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The language by itself is only valuable so long as it points to concepts we can actually agree upon. And if we are agreed upon the concepts, then the language is not worth much, I would go so far as to say it is even worthless or less than worthless. This is especially problematic because terms like spirals or six directions can be very flowery and poetic, so you can attach way too many stupid and unproductive meanings to them that sound similar. So just giving people a new set of words to misinterpret seems sketchy.

I think that if people educated themselves in these concepts and models -- which didn't originate with Ueshiba but are much older -- there would be less room for misinterpretation. Reading is only part of the educational process -- one cannot fully realize how this language ties to Ueshiba's aikido without going out and training with people who can demonstrate and teach these things.

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I am not actually sure we accomplish much merely by pointing out that we mistranslated his verbiage. It's a start, but then you need to prove that when he said six directions he meant the certain concept you are thinking of, rather than, say, decontracted activations and some killer shamanic weed that made everything feel sooooo cosmic and totally made his ki tingle. That's the real task you face.

Six directions, etc., are concepts that can be traced back to practices both in Japan and abroad long before Ueshiba's time, so if one knows these historical sources and understands such models, and can recognize the results in Ueshiba's movement and identify the words he used, then one can safely assume that Ueshiba was referring to those older models. Deconstructed activations, loving ki, etc., are stuff people invented after Ueshiba's time, so how can Ueshiba have been doing those things?

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There's no shortage of people in the world talking about dantiens or yin-yangs or qi or yi or li or jin(g) or taiji or... And then you watch them move on video or such, and it can border on embarassing.
Or to put it one other way: what matters here is the specific training models and the results they produce, not what we call them, since it's all just made-up English labels for stuff anyway. May as well just call it fibewudgetmiklenok, so long as it labels a concrete physical experience that has already been adequately taught. So what are we trying to show? That M. Ueshiba used some set of words, or that he used a specific training model that we can actually dissect and use, especially when we seem so hesitant to really define that meaningful concrete training model?

I agree that results are the most important thing. But a common language would help though, as it would bring people together working on common goals. As for you last questions, I think that efforts such as this blog help clarify both the language and tie that language to specific known and proven training models.

The "Cross Of Aiki" (Love-Ki)
Of the structure of the Great and Swift Kami.
The meritorious deeds (samuhara) of the
Kami of the Eight Powers.

I'd love to know what the original said, it seems that there could be a lot in this one.

I realize with the doka, we also get into an area that could be described as "a translation of a memory" since (it's my understanding) that many of the doka were written down by nidai doshu and others as things they recalled OSensei saying, rather than a collection hand written by OSensei himself and then published.

The "Cross Of Aiki" (Love-Ki)
Of the structure of the Great and Swift Kami.
The meritorious deeds (samuhara) of the
Kami of the Eight Powers.

I'd love to know what the original said, it seems that there could be a lot in this one.

I realize with the doka, we also get into an area that could be described as "a translation of a memory" since (it's my understanding) that many of the doka were written down by nidai doshu and others as things they recalled OSensei saying, rather than a collection hand written by OSensei himself and then published.

千早ぶる神の仕組みの愛気十八大力の神のさむはら

This really requires a longer dissection than I can do here. I'll just point out that the Cross and the Eight Powers are both common and important themes in Ueshiba's writings. I'll also point out that these are pointers to specific technical references.

This really requires a longer dissection than I can do here. I'll just point out that the Cross and the Eight Powers are both common and important themes in Ueshiba's writings. I'll also point out that these are pointers to specific technical references.

This really requires a longer dissection than I can do here. I'll just point out that the Cross and the Eight Powers are both common and important themes in Ueshiba's writings. I'll also point out that these are pointers to specific technical references.

Best,

Chris

I have no idea who is responsible for the translation Chris Moses cited for this. The kindest thing I can say is that it is an exceedingly free reworking of the original. Not that there's anything wrong with pop lit and Jonathan Livingston Seagull if you like that sort of thing.

I have no idea who is responsible for the translation Chris Moses cited for this. The kindest thing I can say is that it is an exceedingly free reworking of the original. Not that there's anything wrong with pop lit and Jonathan Livingston Seagull if you like that sort of thing.

If he was using internal power, there would be no need for tension in his face, clenching teeth, etc...

When completely successful nage is always at ease above his center, this everyone already knows. You're right I almost did lose to the Tengu in that video, but at least they didn't knock me over. They tore a ligament in my shoulder once when I was too stubborn to accept kaeshi waza and take ukemi.

How many Aikidoists here have fought any Tengu, let alone even begun recognizing them? O Sensei fought them many thousands of times, despite never being filmed. I've fought them over a thousand times. When done correctly fighting's impossible because you actually become the Tengu. Careful not to stare too long at them or me though, the whole point of facing them in the first place is to release them until they're needed again. There' many people in the world, cut off from the Infinite to no fault of their own, unable to express their Tengu subjectively as nage. Instead as unconscious uke, by definition, they misplace them objectively onto the world with disastrous effects in infinite-wanting magnitudes, little wonder we've culminated countless converging catastrophes, some of which I've posted on. Insanity isn't incidental, aberrational, or a ‘manageable cost' in our destruction of Gaia, it's the primary cause and condition.

Under the sway of dualism, we have essentially sought to divide the world into two parts, one infinite and the other finite, and then to live wholly in the latter which, because it is finite, is amenable to control. We are like the frog who jumped into a well and, unable to see anything else or remember the vast world beyond, declared himself suzerain of all the universe. Our lordship over nature is at heart an egregious self-deception, because its first step is to attempt nature's precipitous reduction, which is equally a reduction of life, a reduction of experience, a reduction of feeling, and a reduction of being: a true Faustian exchange of the infinite for the finite.

This reduction comes in many guises and goes by many names. It is the domestication of the wild; it is the measuring and quantification of nature; it is the conversion of cultural, natural, social, and spiritual wealth into money. Because it is a reduction of life, violence is its inevitable accompaniment (actually I can think of no better definition of violence than the reduction of life); hence the rising crescendo of violence that has bled our civilization for thousands of years and approaches its feverish apogee as we conclude the present wholesale destruction of entire species, oceans, ecosystems, languages, cultures, and peoples.

Because our demarcation of self and other is a false one, the violence we commit upon the other is actually committed upon ourselves. Here again we find a warning from some of our most venerable spiritual teachings. The doctrine of karma states that the effects of our actions are inescapable, that what we do to others we do to ourselves. Yet, characteristically, our religious institutions twist it to mean, "Be good or you will be punished." The Golden Rule works the same way. Since its original meaning, "As you do unto others, so you do unto yourself," is incoherent nonsense to the dualistic mind, we have perverted it into a rule, a standard of behavior to strive toward. Originally, both the doctrine of karma and the Golden Rule were mere statements of fact based on a different conception of self.

The statement "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39, and elsewhere) falls victim to the same dualistic misinterpretation. Instead of a rule, we might construe it as a simple statement of fact: As you love your neighbor, so do you love yourself. Self and neighbor are not actually separate. Jesus was not going around uttering simple moral platitudes. However, as he was speaking to people immersed in the myth of the separate self, it is no wonder that his teachings were immediately misinterpreted and written down in their current form. The prescriptive and proscriptive forms of spiritual teachings—that is, the do's and don'ts—coincide with the institutional interests of the political powers that coopt all religious movements from the moment of their founders' deaths, if not before.

When completely successful nage is always at ease above his center, this everyone already knows. You're right I almost did lose to the Tengu in that video, but at least they didn't knock me over. They tore a ligament in my shoulder once when I was too stubborn to accept kaeshi waza and take ukemi.

How many Aikidoists here have fought any Tengu, let alone even begun recognizing them? O Sensei fought them many thousands of times, despite never being filmed. I've fought them over a thousand times. When done correctly fighting's impossible because you actually become the Tengu. Careful not to stare too long at them or me though, the whole point of facing them in the first place is to release them until they're needed again. There' many people in the world, cut off from the Infinite to no fault of their own, unable to express their Tengu subjectively as nage. Instead as unconscious uke, by definition, they misplace them objectively onto the world with disastrous effects in infinite-wanting magnitudes, little wonder we've culminated countless converging catastrophes, some of which I've posted on. Insanity isn't incidental, aberrational, or a ‘manageable cost' in our destruction of Gaia, it's the primary cause and condition.

.

Funny you mention that you fought a tengu. We were very "fortunate" at Shin-Budo Kai to have as a student for awhile, the psychic wife of Steven Seagal. Her brief claim to fame was being brought on the Howard Stern show after she lost a close battle for wacko of the week to a guy who had a long-term, love relationship with his dog. Howard Stern felt so bad that she lost, that he believed that the right thing to do was to bring her to the studio in order to interview her life on the radio.

This woman fought many, many tengu. To her, they were Ki Vampires. They would suck the Ki from her feet during practice. When she was told that she was not ready for a test, she became indignant and complained that it was no fair that the other students had only one uke, while she had many (alluding to all of those Ki Vampires). Maybe you two know each other? Maybe you two are related in some sort of tengu way?

Thanks for allowing me to reminisce about some of the good old days in training. Now, did you have any lucid point that you were trying to make?

You may not believe it but the world is in deep trouble. We're experiencing non-linear transformations on a scale that is nearly beyond comprehension and there's no historical precedent for this. Despite all the banter you participate in on this forum, I know your intentions are well. There will be times in our future where we will all be called to situations none of us have ever been in before. I know your Aikido will succeed in the most difficult of circumstances. In fact I don't know of any regular poster here whose Aikido I think wouldn't succeed. I have no ill will toward you or anyone else. You don't have to accept this truce but perhaps you'll consider it. I'm not asking you to stop the kind-hearted jokes either.

You may not believe it but the world is in deep trouble. We're experiencing non-linear transformations on a scale that is nearly beyond comprehension and there's no historical precedent for this. Despite all the banter you participate in on this forum, I know your intentions are well. There will be times in our future where we will all be called to situations none of us have ever been in before. I know your Aikido will succeed in the most difficult of circumstances. In fact I don't know of any regular poster here whose Aikido I think wouldn't succeed. I have no ill will toward you or anyone else. You don't have to accept this truce but perhaps you'll consider it. I'm not asking you to stop the kind-hearted jokes either.

Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.

You may not believe it but the world is in deep trouble. We're experiencing non-linear transformations on a scale that is nearly beyond comprehension and there's no historical precedent for this. Despite all the banter you participate in on this forum, I know your intentions are well. There will be times in our future where we will all be called to situations none of us have ever been in before. I know your Aikido will succeed in the most difficult of circumstances. In fact I don't know of any regular poster here whose Aikido I think wouldn't succeed. I have no ill will toward you or anyone else. You don't have to accept this truce but perhaps you'll consider it. I'm not asking you to stop the kind-hearted jokes either.

Tenyu:

My post was not a joke and was entirely truthful. Your own personal tengu are as significant and real to you as that person I mentioned. The larger issue was that your previous post, in it's entirety, had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the thread.

I have children in the same age bracket as you. My deceased grandfather lived in a world that included going from horse and buggy to rocket ships to the moon. He lived thru two world wars and a host of other world wide calamities. In my life time, there has been numerous wars and atrocities. I use to punch holes in cards to feed into machines to program them to do basic things (computers- using basic language). Now I speak into my multipurpose device (iphone 4s) and it does what i ask it to do. The rate of change has dramatically increased. Some futuristic thinkers look at this as a good thing, while others see the imminent demise of humans. My scale of viewing the world is very, very different than yours. All of the major changes in the last two hundred years have been at a scale never seen before. In each era, people have talked about imminent doom. Life will continue to move in this direction until something else happens......

There is no war between us that needs any kind of truce. The topic of the thread has to do with the growing evidence that some of what we use to believe as new gospel, was not gospel at all, not new, and not fully understood at that time. The new research is pointing out a link to a long-standing tradition that many people missed. In many ways, that is like life. When we are full of piss and vinegar, we think that we know all and own the world. As we get older, we chuckle at how stupid were back then and enjoy/struggle with the radical changes of a new day, while enjoy/struggle with the larger link to long-standing traditions. And so it goes.......

All of the major changes in the last two hundred years have been at a scale never seen before. In each era, people have talked about imminent doom. Life will continue to move in this direction until something else happens......

For at least 200 years now, futurists have been predicting the imminent rise of a technological utopia, drawing on the premise that technology will free humankind from labor, suffering, disease, and possibly even death. Underlying this view is a defining story of our civilization: that science has brought us from a state of ignorance to an increasing understanding of the physical universe, and that technology has brought us from a state of dependency on nature's whims to an increasing mastery of the material world. Someday in the future, goes the story, our understanding and control will be complete.

Philosophers of science will protest that it is already well-established, even in conventional circles, that perfect knowledge and perfect control of the universe is probably impossible (due to such things as mathematical incompleteness, quantum indeterminacy, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions). Be that as it may, this information has yet to filter down to the level of popular consciousness, even among scientists. What I am talking about is the faith encapsulated in the saying, "Science will surely explain it someday." It is the faith that the answer is there, the answer is accessible to science, and that science itself is well-grounded in its primary principles and methods. The technological corollary to this faith in science is our faith in the technological fix. Whatever the problem, the solution lies in technology—finding a way to solve the problem. Science will find an answer. Technology will find a way.

Underlying the Technological Program is a kind of arrogance, that that we can control, manage, and improve on nature. Many of the dreams of Gee Whiz technology are based on this. Control the weather! Conquer death! Download your consciousness onto a computer! Onward to space! All of these goals involve controlling or transcending nature, being independent of the earth, independent of the body. Nanotechnology will allow us to design new molecules and build them atom by atom. Perhaps someday we will even engineer the laws of physics itself. From an initial status of subordination to nature, the Technological Program aims to give us mastery over it, an ambition with deep cultural foundations. Descartes' aspiration that science would make us the "lords and possessors of nature" merely restated an age-old ambition: "And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28).

I found it odd that John would correct Chris -as not being qualified to discuss these things- when it is John himself who is clearly lacking. As a translator John is not capable of establishing the text or offering informed commentary on his choices because he is obviously unfamiliar with the corpus of internal power training and the terms used in the sphere of knowledge existing throughout Asia. Hence, six direction training has little meaning beyond a random collection of words and his opting for Hanmi as a default "translation". Worthy of note was his use of swirling the legs in his response to Chris, instead of spiraling. The very concept of spiraling (ages old) has no real meaning to John so his choices; swirling instead of spiraling are all the same to him.

What we are seeing in John's work is a distinct failure in translation ability aided by a demonstrable failure to understand these basic tenants of internal training in the Asian arts themselves. It would have been a better response if John were to ASK Chris why he chose certain concepts and the use of certain terminology that has been consistent across muliplte cultures. Sadly instead John chose a default "I studied with so and so and have this rank so you are not qualified." In the present age, this tactic and mindset is continuing to fail rather miserably in both skill and overall depth of understanding and context. The former in one-on-one encounters, the later in informed scrutiny of his work.

Chris Li's embarking on his own journey of learning Internal power and aiki has made him the one eminently more qualified to handle the words of Ueshiba than John ever was. The newer more educated and informed translations by Chis Li place Ueshiba in proper context for what he was; a scholar, a student of internal power training and aiki. His heretofore missing words and now properly translated terms are now finally consistent with his movement and teaching.

Currently, I am part of a process that is placing Ueshiba's words in context within the internal training throughout Asia and continuing to define his concepts into actual training models that work and serve to fulfill their promise. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Japanese have failed almost completely in doing the same thing-some are openly admitting it.

This is not the old "Ki wars" and "Aiki wars" that happened on E-budo, Aikido Journal and Aikiweb years ago with the ki and aiki people not being able to clearly demonstrate unusual and usable power and convince any one of anything. Some of whom were openly ridiculed.
While camps are clearly divided, today no one who adheres to the post war model has ever been able to actually stand against those who are well versed in Ueshiba's way. This is a new day of men and women with demonstrable power and skills that people are having an extremely hard time dealing with in person-to the extent that is an almost 100% conversion rate. Because of the real power being displayed, today there are a growing number of teachers getting educated in Ueshiba's teachings. As the teachers currently training in Ueshiba's methods continue to develop, in time Ueshiba's truths will win and reclaim his own art back from those who had turned it into a mere shadow of it's former power under Ueshiba.
It is a great time to be practicing the art of Aikido.
Dan

Weird, looks like he's wearing a stable belt like the Toyama ryu guys from around that period. Wonder if these photos were done for any of his military associations? Actually the outfit looks pretty much like the SDF physical fitness uniform mentioned in the linked article.